Do y’all like this design better?

Being the sensitive guy that I am, I gently urged y’all to suck it up and get used to it for now, because there were many things about the new design that I liked — and which some of y’all liked, too — and I was not inclined to start over from scratch without giving this more of a chance.

But Chip Oglesby, who hosts my site now, saw the complaints and offered to address them. So he came up with a new theme. It’s in place now. I’m still tinkering with it, and there are some small things I liked about the old theme better, but… you’ll find that the comments aren’t so narrow.

15 thoughts on “Do y’all like this design better?”

This is better. As a perpetrator of waywardness, or at least as someone who jumped on an off-topic thread last week, minimizing the direct replies to comments on a post will help keep the conversation from fragmenting into a thousand narrow shards of this-and-that.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of white space to me, too, especially on my iPhone.

But then, I am someone who has an almost religious aversion to white space. Back when I was paginating The State’s editorial pages, I had full control of every square millimeter on the page via Quark XPress, and I would eliminate every stray bit of white space, without mercy. (When others did the pages, which was usually the case, and had trouble fitting everything on the page, I’d go in behind them and show them how — death to white space.)

Now, my objection is more aesthetic, since on the Web you can have any among of white space, and unlimited room for gray words. Not a zero-sum game, the way it was in print.

Anyway, I lack the skill/ability to squeeze out white space the way I used to on the printed page. These templates don’t envision that kind of nitpicking control. And it seems that all of these themes that have other functionality I like also have too much white space.

If I ever have the means for a full, custom redesign, I’ll push to get all the white space out. Until then, I console myself with newfound functionality…

Then get a real computer. It was just the opposite with the short-lived previous version… page width was about 30% text and 70% white space. This newer template is just the opposite for us normal computer users.